Instrumentation: flutes (doubling small frog guiro and slide whistle), oboe (doubling toy bird whistle), clarinet/bass clarinet (doubling slide whistle), horn (doubling medium frog guiro, thunder tube, and electronic tuner), harp (doubling large frog guiro and electronic tuner), guitar (doubling thunder tube and electronic tuner), percussion (1 player), piano (with 2-3 e-bows plus toy bird whistle), violin, viola, cello, and bass
First Performance: 1 June 2019, by Ensemble Dal Niente, conducted by Michael Lewanski, at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, during the LA Philharmonic’s Noon to Midnight marathon
Co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Ensemble Dal Niente.
Duration: 16 minutes
Excerpts from the premiere, with video:
In this piece, I am interested in using stock captions of sounds (musical, paralinguistic, concrète) found in film and television as starting points for transcription, depiction, soundtrack, and Foley. In honoring the original use of captioning and using it as a rhetorical device, the piece allows for new interpretations of “known” sounds. The form gradually moves from natural sounds towards mechanical ones; these are interspersed with descriptions of music itself (“melancholy,” “ominous,” etc.), which tie together with the affects of the representational sounds. The corresponding visuals consist of found clips stripped of their original context and mixed with new or stock footage. My thanks to my wonderful collaborators: Sean Zdenek for his groundbreaking work on captioning, and Tristan Cook for his visual artistry.
““…Cheung’s intensely colourful, exquisitely wrought ensemble-writing lets us imagine [musical illustrations of closed captions]. Rattles and scrapes on woodblocks segue into chiming triangle and into microtonal high winds: there is dazzling control across the instrumental gamut (with equally dazzling performances throughout the album). Restraint is key: Cheung rarely over-eggs the material, framing with silence the sound heard, be it the faint click-clacking of a clarinet’s keys or the buzzing decay of an overplucked harp. Eventually, the contrasting episodes morph into a more continuous texture of swelling, quasi-spectral rising and falling scales. The instrumental variety gives The Natural Word the character of a concerto for orchestra”
“Cheung’s mastery of the timbral potentials of orchestral instruments comes fully into its own…The result is a cohesive soundtrack suggesting a narrative logic one can’t quite put one’s finger on—like experiencing a dream or watching a film with peripheral vision only–but which nevertheless makes perfect sense. At a more prosaic level, Cheung’s orchestrations of the sounds described—low strings for ships’ horns; glissandi on high strings for wind blowing; fused strings and winds for the EKG machine—mimic their models to an uncanny degree.”